LINE the worst of them all

I live in Japan and it's hard not using this POS, because everybody is using LINE these days. However it's one of the worst pieces of crap I've ever used for messaging. Here are my major gripes:

Uses an oddball UI tool on the desktop. Doesn't remotely feel like a native app nor behave like one

The mobile app just ignores privacy settings even when I set Android to not display any details on my login screen for new messages, LINE will happly splurt the contents of new messages on screen.

You must give them your phone number. Full stop. There's now no way to get a LINE account without a smartphone

The desktop app is tied to the smartphone. Lose your smartphone or buy a new one and your account is basically toast

Moving from one phone to another and trying to move your account over is a royal pain in the ass

History is retained, or not or, whatever. On the PC chat history gets randomly deleted, with no clear way to predict when and why. On mobile, if you remove the app and reinstall it with the same account credentials, your history is still gone. No way to get it back.

AlternativeTo is a free service that helps you find better alternatives to the products you love and hate.

The site is made by Ola and Markus in Sweden, with a lot of help from our friends and colleagues in Italy, Finland, USA, Colombia, Philippines, France and contributors from all over the world. That's right, all the lists of alternatives are crowd-sourced, and that's what makes the data powerful and relevant.